Sustainability Assessment of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC): Environmental, Social, Economic, and Cultural Analysis

Abstract

This article presents an assessment of sustainability conducted post the opening of the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC), which underwent vast development that had significant impacts, not only on the global level but also on the international attention towards Egypt’s great civilization. The study investigates the impact of the NMEC’s environmental, social, and economic sustainability and cultural value. Both qualitative and quantitative approaches were adopted. The qualitative includes a preliminary study followed by site visits for collecting data and mapping the four sustainability pillars: environmental, social, economic, and cultural. The quantitative approach has been conducted by exploiting 33 indicators to measure five sustainability dimensions in addition to the UNESCO 15 Thematic Indicators for Culture in the 2030 Agenda; the impact of NMEC on social media using the data scraping technique exploiting GitHub. Energy audit results illustrate that the total annual energy consumption is 491,376.00 kWh (79% in the ground fl. & 21% in the Mummies fl.), as well as 19.98 kWh/m2 (Gr. fl.) and 144 kWh/m2 (Mummies fl.); the first matches RIBA’s benchmark for museums, well below the ranking ‘Good’ (50 kWh/m2). Social sustainability impacts indicate that the word count’s effect on social media is 27%, 31%, and 42% on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, respectively, while the number of followers is 92%, 7%, and 1%. On Google, it is 1275 and ranks 4.7, whereas the number of posts is 231, 350, and 258. Economic sustainability assessment has been addressed by calculating the revenues throughout one year since the grand opening, and the total revenues amount to USD 2,794,047. The cultural sustainability assessment showed a positive response to the evaluation recorded for 9 out of 15 indicators. The sustainability assessment of the NMEC plays a key role in assuring livable and regenerative cities.